Amu stood under the warm water of her shower. She sighed. So much had happened that day and now she had even more questions. Ikuto had somehow slipped out of telling her about Paris, even though she had been meaning to ask him all day. Amu reached behind her and grabbed a wash cloth and her body rinse. She squirted out the pink rinse onto the small white cloth and started to rub it over her. She didn't really understand why she was taking a shower. She hadn't even done much today. She went to write a song, and then she went to the beach, but didn't even get in the water. She didn't mind, really. She liked showers. Amu took a big whiff of the air. It smelled like strawberries, thanks to her body wash. She started to cover her whole body in suds. She worked the wash cloth up the back of her legs when she remembered Ikuto. In particular, she remembered Ikuto grabbing her butt. She blushed. The water seemed to be 10 degrees hotter after that, and she had to go turn it colder. She'd have to hit him for that tomorrow.

"Tomorrow," she said aloud.

Was she going to see Ikuto tomorrow? She hadn't made any plans to see him tomorrow. Oh well, whatever happens will happen, right? She rinsed off the suds and turned off the water. She grabbed her towel. She stepped out of the shower and wrapped it around herself. She started to pick up her clothes off the floor. She blushed when she picked up Ikuto's bathing suit. She didn't even notice that she had been wearing it before her bath. Her parents hadn't said anything about it either. Ikuto obviously didn't mind. After drying off, she pulled her after-shower cover up that she always wore and pulled her hair up into a pony tail to dry. She dropped her clothes, minus Ikuto's bathing suit, into the hamper and went to the kitchen. She grabbed a small glass of milk and went back upstairs to her room. She opened the door and went to go sit on her bed.

"Yo," cooed a blue haired boy sitting on Amu's desk chair.

Amu almost dropped her glass out of shock, "I-Ikuto! What are you doing here? How did you get in?"

"It's not safe to leave your window unlocked," he said nonchalantly.

Amu blushed, "Well, why are you here?"

"I came to get my bathing suit. You seem to have left with it by mistake."

Amu blushed at the suit draped over her arm. She sat on her bed and threw the bathing suit at Ikuto's head. He didn't move to take it off of his face immediately, but he chuckled. He let the clothing article slide off his face into his lap. He lifted it back up to his face and sniffed it, "Why does it smell like strawberries?"

Amu blushed, "That's my body wash."

"Very…" Ikuto searched for the right word, "Fruity."

Amu nodded awkwardly.

Ikuto twisted back and forth in the spinning computer chair leisurely.

Amu sat in silence for a moment as Ikuto got up from her pink computer chair and sat down on the bed beside her.

Ikuto pressed his nose into her shoulder. "Strangely enough," Ikuto said facetiously, "You smell like my bathing suit. Now why is that?" he joked.

Amu slammed her palm to her forehead over-dramatically as Ikuto chuckled at her reaction.

Ikuto wrapped his arms around her and pulled her closer to him, "Has my little Strawberry been cuddling my swim suit?"

Amu grumbled and pushed Ikuto off the bed. He landed on her floor with a thud.

"I was only joking," He said as he looked up at her. "That really hurt."

"I-I don't care. That was… dirty," Amu grimaced.

Ikuto stretched and rested his arms behind his head. He crossed his legs on the hard wooden floor and started examining papers that were stuffed under the bed.

He pulled out piece of notebook paper that looked like it was drawn on with a bright pink highlighter. Ikuto read the paper aloud, "Amu heart Tadase forever; Hotori Amu, Hotori Amu, Hotori Amu; Tadase and Amu, Tadase and Amu, Tadase and Amu; Tadase, My Prince; 'Amu, will you marry me? I love you ever so much; I want to make you my princess;' I love Hotori Tadase."

"Ikuto, why are you going through my stuff," Amu asked angrily.

"It was just, you know, lying there. So I picked it up and started reading it," Ikuto shrugged.

"Lies—I put that under my bed," Amu grabbed the paper from Ikuto.

"So, you must really have a crush on this Tadase kid, huh," Ikuto climbed back onto the bed and stretched out in front of Amu.

Amu crumpled up the paper and tossed it at her wastebasket—and missed.

"Nice shot," Ikuto taunted. He leaned over the side of the bed and grabbed another piece of paper and balled it up. He too shot it at the wastebasket, but his bounced off Amu's pink computer chair and back into the can. "That's how you do it."

Amu sighed and hit Ikuto playfully on the head, "You're such a show-off, you know that?"

"Yeah, sort of," Ikuto grinned at her.

A thought popped into Amu's mind, "Oh, Ikuto, do we have anything planned for tomorrow?"

"Why," he smirked, "You want to go on a date?"

Amu blushed, "No."

"Do you have a date for tomorrow or something, t hen?"

Strangely, Amu blushed more at this then at the first question, "No, of course not."

Ikuto paused.

"Why, do you want to go on a date or something?" Amu retorted smartly.

Ikuto chuckled, "Oh, someone has a witty mouth. Alas—no, I'm not interested in a date at the moment. I was just making sure you have some sort of life—which you obviously don't."

"I have a life," Amu argued.

Ikuto opened his mouth to reply with what was probably a well thought out clever comment, but he was interrupted by his phone beeping. He pulled it out of his back pocket and opened it to read a text.

Amu raised her eyebrows in question to the contents of the message.

Ikuto stood up off of the bed, "I've got to go," he said. "Dinner's ready."

"Dinner's ready?" The word didn't exactly process through Amu's mind, since she had assumed that Ikuto had lived alone, given his dark and lonesome attitude.

"Yeah, I live with Utau. She may be annoying," he smirked, "But she is an amazing cook."

"Oh," Amu said. "So we don't have any recording or anything tomorrow?"

"Not unless Shiragin decides to schedule some surprise practice session, which he hasn't done since I started working with him."

"Okay then, I'll see you… whenever," Amu said.

Ikuto climbed out of Amu's window and stood on her balcony, facing her. He gave her a cute little two-fingered salute and jumped off the edge of the balcony.

Amu, flustered, ran over to the trash can and pulled back out the paper she had crumpled up. She straightened it out to her best ability, and hugged it lovingly to her chest. "Tadase-kun," she sighed.

She folded the paper in fourths and placed it in her desk drawer. She got dressed into her pajamas and went back downstairs to watch a little television before bed.

Little had she known, though, that Ikuto hadn't left. He had been hiding outside her window in the shadows of the night. He had watched her after she had though that he was gone, and he saw how she eagerly fished her paper out of the trash can and given it a hug.

Many different things went through Ikuto's mind then. He wasn't a psychiatrist, no, but he had spent a good deal of his time in institutions—they didn't call them asylums—even though everyone knew that's what they were. They had a gated yard with a razor barbed wire on top—it was an asylum. The things that went through his head at that moment had been things that he had overheard while he was visiting. Stockholm syndrome was the first and most prominent idea. He went over the definition he had memorized in his mind, an extraordinary phenomenon in which a hostage begins to identify with and grow sympathetic to their captor.

Ikuto stuffed his hands in his pockets and pulled his cell phone back out. He opened Utau's message and replied to it, saying "I'll be a bit late. Sorry."

Ikuto walked back to the EASTER building in a modest pace. He counted every step he took. Numbers went through his head, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Then they repeated again, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Every step had a number, until he had gone through the numbers about six times. He then restarted his count, but instead using letters instead of letters. Each step made the sound of a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, and so on. He didn't even think twice about it. This was something he did habitually. He used it to keep his mind busy, and himself focused. He repeated the process, going through numbers, then through the alphabet, then even started to spell out words or math equations in time with his steps. T-s-u-k-i-y-o-m-i- I-k-u-t-o; f-o-r-t-y-f-o-u-r d-i-v-i-d-e-d b-y t-w-e-n-t-y p-l-u-s f-i-v-e t-o t-h-e t-h-i-r-d p-o-w-e-r t-i-m-e-s f-o-u-r e-q-u-a-l-s f-i-v-e h-u-n-d-r-e-d t-w-o p-o-i-n-t t-w-o.

The crisp night's breeze blew against Ikuto's face calmly. He felt like he was in a good mood. He didn't in fact know why, but he was. Maybe it was because he thought he had figured out what was wrong in Amu's head. As he passed by a lowly lit intersection he saw two school girls walking down the road in the opposite direction of him. One of them was talking to the other, but was interrupted with the other spotted him from across the street and started to point to him. He heard bits and pieces of what they were saying, such as the fact that it was dark, so she wasn't too sure if it was him, but then that she knew in her heart that it was him. They argued for the slightest second about going over and asking for autographs, but decided not to, on account they still weren't completely sure it was him. They passed each other, on opposite sides of the road, without a word. As he headed off for the EASTER building, he heard a raised voice behind him. Under a street lamp, he saw two men who had cornered the girls. They each had a hold on one of the girl's wrists, but the girls were struggling to get away. The girls yelled at him to let them go, they didn't want any trouble. The men started to drag the girls roughly to a motel that was near by. The girls started to try to hit them, but the men were much bigger, and just laughed at their petty attempts at escape.

Ikuto stood and watched as they continued to get dragged away. He noticed that counting had stopped in his head. Counting was what kept his mind to itself, but when he stopped counting, his mind started to control things it shouldn't. Ikuto tried to decide what to do. He knew the right thing would be to pull out his cell phone and call the police, but his pride got in the way of being a tattle-tale. "It's not your problem," he thought to himself. "You don't know those girls. You've never seen them before in your life," it tried to persuade him.

None the less, Ikuto did what could have been the worst choice. He broke out into a sprint down the dark street toward the men.

He said to them in a superior tone, "Hey!"

The men looked at each other then looked back at Ikuto. The one with black hair said, "What do you want, kid?"

"Where are you taking those girls?" he asked.

"To a motel, they're our girlfriends'. We're off to have a little fun. Is there anything wrong with that?"

He considered giving the answer "no," then leaving them to their business, but he couldn't seem to figure out how.

"Don't think I'm dumb. I saw you grab them off the street, I know what you're going to do," he put his arms up beside him as if to stop the offenders from going any further.

The two men looked at each other again. This time, the one with blonde hair replied, "Well, I guess we'll just have to take care of a few things first."

As soon as the words left his mouth, his fist came flying and hit Ikuto square in the jaw.

Ikuto was blown back, but regained himself quickly. An evil smirk played across his lips as he gently caressed his jaw, which was probably fractured now. Ikuto reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. He reached his hand inside and pulled out a small Swiss Army knife. He pressed the button, and the glimmering blade flung out of the wooden capsule with ease.

The fight was short. The girls hid as best they could in the shadows, covering their eyes from the blows. The two men escaped still alive, but each with a bit of a limp, and a tiny trail of blood. Ikuto was probably the most hurt of all. The men had gotten a hold of his knife, and stabbed him in the arm. His jaw was definitely fractured, if not broken, and he had bruises on his face and all over his arms. Ikuto swirled his tongue around him mouth, collecting all the blood that had leaked from punctures and blows near his mouth, and spit it out on the street. He fixed his hair in a fashion to conceal his bruises as best he could. He walked over to the girls and tapped them on the shoulder, letting them know that the men were gone.

Ikuto hadn't even noticed that the fight had heightened his mood. He didn't notice until after the girls had asked for his autograph and to take their pictures with him on their cell phones. He didn't even notice that he had actually been smiling in the picture (even if it was still his cat's grin).

He finally made his way back to EASTER without another interruption. He took the elevator to the third floor, and walked to Shiragin's office.

Shiragin looked at him with wide eyes, "What happened to you?"

"It doesn't matter," Ikuto said, "What matters is, is that Amu's a virgin."

"And how did you come to this conclusion?" Shiragin asked suspiciously.

"She told me. She said that she hadn't been raped or anything," Ikuto smiled at him, hoping for some sign of approval for solving the case. Instead he was faced with a stern glare and a tight frown.

"I told you not to talk to her about that," he said.

"So? I figured out what I wanted to know, so its all good now," Ikuto shrugged to hide the fact that he inwardly embarrassed to think that someone would actually approve of him.

"Well, did you ask her or what?" Shiragin asked purely out of curiosity.

"We were just talking, and it came up. I had to bug her about it for a little, then we got into a little fight, then she told me that Tadase hadn't raped her, then she almost fell out of a tree, then she told me that she was still a virgin," Ikuto said it all in one breath, he was so excited.

"Ikuto," Shiragin said with a tone of pity in his voice, "What has this girl done to you?"

Ikuto raised his eyebrows in question to what he meant.

"Before you met her, you didn't believe a thing that anyone said. I could tell you something of petty importance, but you would still question if it was true or not."

"I never did that," Ikuto defended.

"Ikuto, just last week, I was complaining that the vending machine had run out of Pockey, and then after you came back from the bathroom, you told me that I was right. The vending machines are nowhere close to the bathrooms!"

Ikuto understood, but he was making his best at stalling anyway, "And your point is?"

"You never trusted anyone until you met Amu. Now when she tells you that she wasn't raped or anything, you're going to just go and believe her without any evidence."

Ikuto looked away with a somewhat guilty expression on his face.

"So tell me," Shiragin changed the subject, "what happened to your face? And why is there blood on your jacket?"

"I got in a fight on the street," Ikuto mumbled. "These guys were trying to take these girls back to a motel with them, but they didn't want to go."

Shiragin stared at Ikuto. The attempt at changing the subject was a failure, so he just jumped back to his discussion about Amu.

"Ikuto," he said to him, "You can't believe her. She has given you no evidence, no nothing. You have no reason to believe her so early on."

At that Ikuto turned on his heel and headed for the door.

"You're definitely Aruto's boy," he said.

Ikuto left the room and pretended that he hadn't even heard him.

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